ARL’s Position Description Bank Goes Live Online

The ARL Position Description Bank aggregates position descriptions from participating academic and research libraries, making the PDs browsable and searchable. The ARL PD Bank provides a source for current PDs and also tracks the evolution of positions—and library functions and services—and the varied ways in which institutions organize and define functions.

The ARL PD Bank also provides participating institutions with a functional digital archive of their own position descriptions. In addition to standard data fields available to all participants, individual libraries may elect to use custom data fields that would not be viewable by other institutions, such as employee and supervisor names, classification, date last reviewed/modified, and other data identified by the institution as useful for internal purposes.

The ARL PD Bank has been developed by a team from the University of Florida Libraries and ARL, along with personnel officers from ARL member institutions, who were engaged via surveys, focus groups, and beta testing.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.